Robyn Blumner2015-03-31T18:25:55-04:00Robyn Blumnerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=robyn-blumnerCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Robyn BlumnerGood old fashioned elbow grease.Being 'Openly Secular' Is the First Step To Eliminating the Stigmatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.58531202014-09-20T12:05:18-04:002014-11-20T05:59:01-05:00Robyn Blumnerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/robyn-blumner/was ineligible to reenlist because he crossed out the phrase on his reenlistment form.

For many people of good will, the controversy will rile them up. "Why make a big deal out of words that the majority of Americans believe in?" Just cross your fingers if you must, and say the words. Why rock the boat?

Here's why: The incident betrays a subtext of intolerance and hostility toward secular people embedded in American culture and public institutions. The Air Force was ready to end a man's military career because he would not submit to its religious demands.

To secular Americans, requiring an oath to God is like asking a Jewish airman to swear, "So help me Jesus" or a Christian to say, "So help me Allah." The objection to forcing the oath on nonbelievers should be obvious. It's not.

But a new campaign is hoping to change all that. Openly Secular, launching Saturday, is a new coalition of more than two dozen secular groups -- one of the largest of its kind -- coming together with the goal of raising awareness of the numbers of non-religious people in the country. We include not only atheists and agnostics, but our allied organizations include religious people of many denominations who cherish the Founding Fathers' ideal of church-state separation.

The polls are pretty startling. A Pew poll this year found that nearly half of Americans say it's necessary to believe in God to be a moral person. Another current poll found Americans would rather vote for an adulterous or pot-smoking candidate for President than one who is an atheist.

Many religious Americans would be startled to discover how many non-believers they already know and like. Too many religious Americans are convinced they can't trust people who don't subscribe to a faith. The truth is, they are constantly trusting nonbelievers; they just don't realize it.

Secular people are not just academics and scientists -- although most academics and 93 percent of the National Academy of Sciences are non-believers. Secular people are in police departments protecting streets from crime. They are taxi drivers, waiters, shopkeepers. They are doctors and nurses treating the sick. And they are serving in the military, putting their lives on the line to protect the country.

Look at the videos on "OpenlySecular.org" to see average, hard-working Americans come forward and talk about their lives as nonbelievers. The Openly Secular coalition hopes to eliminate the social costs of coming forward. It is lamentable that people fear they are risking their jobs, businesses and personal relationships, simply through being true to who they are.

One day soon, the stigma and disdain will be so diminished that allowing an airman to reenlist in the Air Force without swearing to a deity he doesn't believe in won't have to become a federal case.

]]>Why Are the Openly Secular Openly Disdained?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.53812482014-05-23T16:46:15-04:002014-07-23T05:59:04-04:00Robyn Blumnerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/robyn-blumner/
These questions were recently put to Americans by the Pew Research Center in a poll asking what traits would make someone less likely to vote for a candidate for president of the United States.

The trait people identified as the least desirable in a president: "Atheist." 53 percent of Americans said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who is an atheist. It beat out pot-smoker and adulterer. People found atheism a bigger barrier to high office than someone who is gay or lesbian, or even someone who lacked any political experience.

Wow. The Christian Right complains there is a war on them, but here's proof that it's just the opposite. A politician's strong religious beliefs do not harm his or her chances for public office. But Americans willingly share their bias against non-believers with pollsters, as if it is self-evident atheists are not to be trusted.

Meanwhile, the media goes along.

For instance, Denver radio host Dan Caplis recently tossed this out when discussing Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling's racist comments: "All racists are, at the end of the day, atheists." What? On what basis is he making this claim? And where was the corresponding outcry by the press for such a baseless and callous assertion?

Then there's Fox News's Megyn Kelly, who recently threw around the term "atheist" as a way to discredit an organization that fights for church-state separation in the military. Kelly labeled Mikey Weinstein, the founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an atheist -- though he's not -- as a pejorative, signaling to viewers that this man should not be trusted because his complaints come with an anti-God agenda.

Okay, that's Fox News, but even the New York Times is guilty of knee-jerk bias. Columnist Nicholas Kristof, in a recent column on Americans' shocking lack of basic knowledge on religion, singled out non-believers as particularly clueless, saying, "secular Americans are largely ignorant about religion."

In fact, polls show that secular Americans are more knowledgeable about religion than those who profess to follow one.

A 2010 Pew survey asked Americans more than 30 questions about various aspects of religion, including the Bible, Christianity, Judaism, Mormonism, world religions, religion in public life and atheism and agnosticism.

The group that performed the best was the atheists and agnostics. They were able to answer nearly 21 out of 32 questions correctly, compared with an average respondent's score of 16 correct answers. No group -- including Christians or Jews -- scored as high as atheists and agnostics on religious knowledge.

People who reject the religion they were born into often give it a great deal of thought and study before walking away. Atheists know they are risking the loss of family relationships, friendships and community for being true to their own reasoning. Being open about one's non-belief carries the possibility of job discrimination, the loss of business, and social alienation.

Why is it that in the 21st century, when America's economic might depends upon science, technology and innovation, people who subscribe to a science- and evidence-based view of the natural world are social pariahs?

This prejudice is particularly evident in the political realm, where being open about non-belief is an insuperable barrier to election. Moreover, seven states still ban atheists from holding office -- prohibitions that violate the U.S. Constitution's prohibition on religious tests for public office, but remain on the books because no lawmaker wants to be seen supporting their repeal.

To counter this, a new coalition called Openly Secular has formed. Made up of more than two dozen national organizations across the secular movement, Openly Secular's goal is to increase acceptance and eliminate discrimination of atheists, agnostics and other seculars.

By being open about our beliefs and values, we at Openly Secular want to show that -- like all people -- we are worthy of acceptance, common decency, respect and equality, no matter our religious views or lack of them. We ask voters, journalists, and everyone, to keep this in mind before marginalizing us again.

Robyn Blumner is the Executive Director for the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science and the project director for Openly Secular.]]>Dear Too Big To Failtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2008:/theblog//3.1492992008-12-11T09:31:05-05:002011-05-25T12:55:17-04:00Robyn Blumnerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/robyn-blumner/
Happy Holidays to you. I'm guessing your end-of-the-year bonus won't be quite as eye-popping as it was last year -- sorry there. But at least you still have a job. That's not necessarily true for my associates in the world of Too Small To Matter. We're hurting during this economic meltdown. You know, the one that you caused.

I hope you count your blessings this year as you tighten that extralong belt. I suggest you go easy on the Chateau Mouton-Rothschild; you never know if the Treasury Department and Congress will finally get serious about limiting your compensation in exchange for the billions you're getting in bailout money.

I know you say it would be nearly impossible to find someone as smart as you to take over the Too Bigs for a mere few hundred thousand a year in total compensation.

After all, it's always challenging finding someone qualified for vacancies on the Supreme Court. Justices pull in about $200k, and at that salary the jobs go begging.

But you have a point about the value of your special kind of intelligence. What do you think the ratio is? For every dollar a Too Big CEO earned, he laid the groundwork for losses of $1,000, $10,000 for his company and its investors? Yup, those kinds of smarts would be hard to replicate.

I have to hand it to you, though, in the way you Too Big people arranged the world so nicely for yourselves. How is it that you got the very federal regulators (or antiregulators, as you demanded they be) who kept their hands off exotic securities under the banner that the free market had to operate unfettered, to swoop in when you got into trouble from your gambles in those same instruments?

How is it that you got the very economists who wrote Ph.D. theses titled, "Government Must Never, Ever Act To Head Off Any Financial Bubble," to suddenly demand blank government checks for all the Too Bigs, when your bubble burst?

In the Too Small world this is all beyond our ken.

From our simple take, the only idea tried so far to loosen credit markets is to dip a hand in our pocket and give the money over to you in ever larger chunks. Then hope that you don't hoard it to freshen your balance sheets, pay out dividends or pay yourselves first.

Funny how those hopes vanished almost as soon as they were aired. When you Too Big guys find yourselves together in the Men's Room, you must really get a chuckle out of that.

We do have questions, though, from our lowly post.

How is it that the Big Three credit rating agencies are still operating? If I had turned an ungodly profit by putting my seal of approval on investments that turned out to be garbage, not only would my company be toast but I'd be deeply worried about personal liability and jail.

Instead, the Big Three keep churning out ratings, while their top executives shrug at that hiccup found in their complex algorithms. I mean, who would ever think to put into a risk calculation of securitized packages of home loans the possibility of housing prices falling? It's too crazy.

And then there's the little trick -- cute really -- that Citigroup has been playing with its bad assets. The corporation moved billions of dollars worth of them "off balance sheet."

Now, we Too Small To Matter folks have trouble even reading a balance sheet. But is it really true that in your Too Big world a financial statement that doesn't reflect all toxic assets is just cutting edge accounting? See, where we come from, it's fraud.

Well, since your time is about 400 times more valuable than ours relative to how much we're paid, I won't bother you anymore.

Please allow me to introduce you to John, age 8, and his brother James, age 4 [months]. These boys are thriving in the home of two loving, nurturing adults. But it wasn't always so.

When they arrived in December 2004 at the North Miami home of their new foster parents, then-4-year-old John was wearing a dirty adult-sized T-shirt and sneakers that were four sizes too small and worn like flip-flops. Both he and his brother had scalp ringworm and 4 month-old James had an ear infection. John did not speak, couldn't hold a pencil and had never seen a book before.

John, it seems, had only one concern and that was changing, feeding and looking out for his baby brother. At the beginning, John hoarded food and hid it in his room. His foster parents would bring him to the stove at mealtimes to see the great quantities of food available, assuring him there was plenty.

The brothers went from a world of chronic neglect and deprivation to one that is nurturing, stimulating and safe. I know all this because it is laid out in throat-lumping plainness by Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman, who ruled on Tuesday that the boys could be adopted by their foster father, 47 year-old Frank Martin Gill, who is gay.

Her 53-page ruling declaring that Florida's 31-year ban on gay adoption is unconstitutional is a masterpiece of truth and compassion, grounded in a thorough analysis of 30 years of social science on gay parenting as well as spot-on legal reasoning.

Judge Lederman, who is an old acquaintance, has offered us the best of what judges can bring to society: a repudiation of laws that are a malignant manifestation of the bigotry of their time.

Florida's ban on gay adoption passed in 1977. Now, it has been judicially recognized that there is no rational basis for this kind of sweeping intolerance encoded in law. As Lederman said, "Sexual orientation is not a predictor of a person's ability to parent."

Gill and his life partner were touted as "model parents" by the children's guardian ad litem, who visited the boys monthly for years and called the Gill home "one of the most caring and nurturing placements" he has ever encountered. Lederman found that Gill "is an exceptional parent to John and James who have healed in his care."

Now allow me to introduce you to Dr. George Rekers, a clinical psychologist who is also an ordained Baptist minister. Rekers was one of the state's star witnesses in its efforts to keep Gill from making John and James his sons.

Rekers testified that homosexual adults are unfit as adoptive parents because they are more likely to suffer from depression and tend to have a larger number of partners over their lives.

Hmm. If true, could it be because people like Rekers marginalize gay citizens and work to block the ability of gays to obtain stability through marriage?

Rekers often invokes what he calls God's moral laws to decree that homosexual behavior shouldn't be countenanced by his profession. According to Rekers, individual homosexuals are "manipulated by leaders of the homosexual revolt" to the detriment of those suffering this "sexual perversion." Rekers' testimony was easily discredited. Instead the court relied on empirical studies demonstrating that there are "no differences" in the adjustment of children with gay parents.

Martin Luther King Jr. said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." It is bending a bit now, for John and James, for Gill and his partner, and for the nearly 1,000 children in Florida who are waiting for good, loving, permanent homes.

But then, when these voters are confronted with politically conservative candidates who seem to defy the Christian Right's rigid prescription for moral behavior, they shrug. No biggie.

When I look at the ticket of McCain-Palin, I see a guy who was a playboy, who left his first wife after she stood by him, raising his children, until his release as a POW. I see a VP pick who gave birth a mere eight months after eloping, whose husband has had trouble with the concept of a designated driver, and whose pregnant 17-year-old daughter is unmarried.

But what really burns my begonias is not this explicit hypocrisy. It is that the Christian Right is positively jubilant over the fact that Sarah Palin's daughter intends to keep the baby and get married, yet conservatives to have helped to ensure that few young people have that as a viable option.

The life prospects of a teenage couple with a child and only high school degrees have collapsed in this modern economy. Things that might have prevented this deterioration such as support for unionism, fair trade policies, a minimum wage that constitutes a living wage and universal health care, have all been anathema to the Republican Party.

Bristol Palin and future baby will do fine, of course, with grandma's stature and money. Others are not so lucky:

For the first 18 years of the child's life, fathers of children born to women between the ages of 18 and 19 will make $13,200 less than fathers of children born to women age 20-21, according to a study by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy.

But the real kicker is how devastating it is to show up on the nation's employment doorstep without a college degree.

If Levi Johnston, Bristol's intended, decides to support his new charge rather than complete college, he can expect to lose over a million dollars in earnings over his working life. For Bristol, the choice of bypassing college will drop her lifetime income by 40 percent. And about 85 percent of teen mothers who marry between their baby's conception and birth will not return to school within six months.

Also, teen parents shouldn't count on having health insurance since only 58 percent of high school graduates enjoy that perk, while nearly 80 percent of people with a college degree have coverage.

The prospects for married teenage parents have probably never matched those of couples who married later and obtained higher educational levels. But there was a time in this country when their financial outlook didn't look so bleak.

Yes, freewheeling globalization has had something to do with the downturn. But that isn't the only culprit. Hotel maids in Las Vegas, for example, enjoy a middle-class standard of living because their union demands it.

You can't outsource making a bed.

The anti-unionism of the Republican Party combined with its unwillingness to use government to look out for working people has markedly undermined the prospects of low-skilled workers.

The minimum wage is a case in point. If it were boosted to a point where every full-time worker had a chance of affording food, shelter and health care, the opportunity costs of choosing young parenthood wouldn't be so devastating. But Republicans in Congress have fought fiercely against every increase.

So when the "values voters" applaud teen marriage and parenthood, they are embracing a life choice that their favored party has vanquished for anyone with hopes of a secure future.

I wonder how many pregnant teens have chosen to have an abortion because of this very calculation? Not an insubstantial number is my guess.

This article originally appeared in the St. Petersburg Times
]]>Sen. McCain and the Zygotetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2008:/theblog//3.1232142008-09-02T12:46:31-04:002011-05-25T12:40:20-04:00Robyn Blumnerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/robyn-blumner/
I had a conversation with a seemingly smart woman recently who thought that Roe vs. Wade would never be overturned regardless of who wins the presidency. Though deeply pro-choice, she said she has voted for a Republican as president in the past since she likes the concept of local control and thinks Republicans represent that ideal better.

Now, had she said that she's willing to forgo abortion rights for other Republican political values, that would be one thing. (Although President Bush's imperial presidency stands starkly inapposite to her stated interest in decentralized power.) But she couldn't even contemplate a world without Roe's protections. She was horrified by the prospect, and yet through determined denial she was willing to be an instrument of the ruling's demise.

We are almost certainly one U.S. Supreme Court justice away from Roe being consigned to the dustbin of history. With two of the court's liberals being the two oldest members on the court -- Justice John Paul Stevens is 88 years old and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 75 years old -- the next president is going to be the decider.

And if he wins, Sen. John McCain promises to be the one to overturn Roe by picking justices who will do the deed. On this, McCain couldn't be clearer.

In case you missed his recent appearance before the evangelical audience of pastor Rick Warren's Saddleback Church, McCain was asked: When is a baby entitled to human rights? His emphatic response: "At the moment of conception." (Add wild applause here.)

Think about this.

Were this view to come to pass and a single-cell zygote were imbued with 14th Amendment rights to life, liberty and property, not only would abortion rights go away, but infertile couples would lose the option of in vitro fertilization. It would also mean the end of all embryonic stem cell research.

This last bit is at odds with McCain's expressed stance. He has said he would allow federal funds for embryonic cell research in narrow circumstances, on embryos slated for destruction in fertility clinics.

But to state the obvious, embryos with rights equivalent to a Bar Mitzvah boy may not be destroyed for scientific experimentation, even if that science holds immense medical promise for, you know, the born.

And those fertility clinics McCain speaks of would have to close, since it would not be okay -- not in the least -- to freeze all those petri-dish-souls who are not lucky enough to be implanted in a womb.

A five-day-old embryo of about 150 cells used in stem cell research is smaller than a grain of sand. (Note that the brain of a fruit fly has 250,000 cells.) The idea of human rights flowing to such an entity is just plain silliness. But the consequences of this view are not silly at all.

Right now a controversy is swirling around Mike Leavitt, secretary of Health and Human Services, who proposed new regulations on Thursday that potentially embrace the human-rights-at-conception paradigm.

The regulations would deny federal funds to hospitals, clinics, pharmacies and health plans that don't allow their employees to opt out of providing care that offends their personal convictions.

In other words, if a doctor holds the belief that human rights attach at conception, he must be allowed to refuse to provide emergency contraception to patients who need it -- even a rape victim.

Catholic hospitals and pharmacies too would be able to deny women access to so-called morning-after pills.

Extremists claim it's a chemical abortion by occasionally preventing the implantation of a fertilized egg.

Pro-choice Republican voters are deluding themselves if they think Roe is eternal no matter who wins the White House. If McCain is president he promises to grant human rights to microscopic cells and he very well may succeed.

It is irksome that every time I shop at Amazon, ads for the Kindle appear front and center. The Web store claims to be able to intuit what I would want to read, so why can't it figure out that I don't want a Kindle and actually resent the thing? I am not "platform-agnostic." I worry about book publishing in a post-Kindle world. Will paper survive?

I can't quantify this, but a percentage of my book-reading pleasure -- and not an insubstantial one -- is derived from the physicality of reading. I love holding a book in my hand and the stolid way it occupies a space. I love the sense of accomplishment as the pages on the unread side diminish. And it's not just a matter of how many pages are left, but of inches read versus inches to go, as the weight of the book shifts.

A book of significant length is a statement of gravitas through bulk. The earth-bound book communicates something about itself and its reader by being so imposing. Reading it is a project, a commitment.

In contrast, e-books are by their nature captured sunbeams -- ephemera -- offering no trophy for reading.

I write this while surrounded by books on overpacked shelves. I peruse them with pride, reading bindings and allowing my mind to momentarily remember the upshot: Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace -- a clever take on the odd and banal; The Power Broker by Robert Caro -- Robert Moses was an arrogant genius; My Antonia by Willa Cather -- life was simpler then.

This is true of mine. Every fifth book that my eyes wander over is not yet read. It is waiting for me to pick it up. Some would think this a terrible waste, but I take comfort in having books at the ready. I get to many eventually, but I have to see its binding and be enticed by the cover to want to pluck it from exile. I'm guessing that e-books don't call out in the same way.

In 2006, William Powers, media critic at the National Journal and a fellow at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard, wrote a white paper titled: Hamlet's Blackberry: Why Paper is Eternal. It was very hopeful to us paper-philes.

"There are cognitive, cultural and social dimensions to the human-paper dynamic that come into play every time any kind of paper, from a tiny Post-it note to a groaning Sunday newspaper, is used to convey, retrieve or store information," Powers writes. "Paper does these jobs in a way that pleases us, which is why, for centuries, we have liked having it around. It's also why we will never give it up as a medium."

Powers quotes studies finding that paper has inherent characteristics that facilitate the "full-immersion, deep-dive" kind of "shut out the world" reading focus.

He says that paper's immutability means that: "The book you place on your nightstand as you drift off to sleep will be exactly the same book when you wake up in the morning." This comforts us.

Also, Powers notes that the physical limitations of paper necessitate that it be selective -- as opposed to the limitlessness of cyberspace -- and this "imposes order on the vastness of the information universe."

He says that for e-paper to replace paper, it will have to become paper.

Kennedy benefited from a change in national consciousness ushered in by FDR. Thanks to Roosevelt, old bromides about the inerrancy of laissez-faire capitalism were tossed aside, replaced by a sense that government was needed to stand watch over the unbridled greed of markets. He moved the nation toward a more protective regulatory state and sought to spread prosperity with a progressive tax structure and the establishment of rights for working people.

With Americans feeling that government was on their side, Kennedy's inaugural "ask what you can do" exhortation was a call to a collective national will -- we are in this complex, dangerous world together and everyone has a sacrifice to make.

Bush, on the other hand, followed the line that his party had successfully sold since at least Ronald Reagan: Shared sacrifice in the name of the common good is a socialist trick. Bush was so uninterested in demanding anything of us following the al-Qaida attack and invasion of Iraq that he pushed for tax cuts and refused to consider a draft to bring military ranks up to needed levels.
No new money, no new troops -- now let's start a pre-emptive war.

The legerdemain is that Bush demanded sacrifice, but of people with no power to object: our military reservists who thought they were signing up as weekend soldiers and the generations who will be burdened by the crippling debts reaped by Bush's Iraq adventure and his millionaires' tax cuts.

Sen. John McCain has not yet gotten the memo that the country doesn't want more of the same. He essentially promises to maintain the status quo in Iraq and to renew the tax cuts. (He also promises to end deficit spending by the end of his first term -- a feat for which he offers no feasible plan. He thinks we're idiots.)

But the populace has figured out that when conservatives hold formal power they will denounce government in public while quietly using it in back rooms to enrich their friends in the military-industrial complex, on Wall Street and at the country club.

Government is coming back in part because it has never gone away. It was just cruelly manipulated to serve elite masters.

When the credit card industry wanted to make it harder for average folks to declare bankruptcy after they became ensnared in debts through the overextension of credit, Congress obliged.

When private health insurance companies wanted to profit on the Medicare program and new drug benefit, Congress opened that door.

And there are hundreds of similar examples of what has happened since the reins of government were handed to leaders more concerned with servicing corporate interests than the little guy's.

Americans' faith in government's ability to effectuate positive change is returning because we have nowhere else to turn. The antigovernment types have made a royal mess of things. But our nation's future stewardship will take personal sacrifice. Energy independence and universal health care are not free. And if we want to wage war, we have to pay for it, regardless of the fantasia of the current administration.

There was a time when government was expected to act in furtherance of the common good and was given the benefit of the doubt when sacrifice was called for. That time is coming back. It's the only viable option there is.]]>Workers Deserve a Rescue Tootag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2008:/theblog//3.1140482008-07-22T16:16:39-04:002011-05-25T12:40:20-04:00Robyn Blumnerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/robyn-blumner/
Last week, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson quickly fashioned a plan to keep mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac liquid and solvent by using billions in taxpayer loans and guarantees.

It was similar to treatment given the major Wall Street investment banks when they teetered due to their irresponsible bets on subprime mortgages. The Fed jumped to open its discount window allowing them to borrow money using their toxic securities as collateral.

Investment interests falter and our government is nimble and responsive.

But when the lowest paid workers in our nation are cheated out of their modest wages, the lifeboat, it seems, is full.

A scathing review of the way workers' complaints have been mishandled and ignored by the Wage and Hour Division of the Labor Department has just been issued by the Government Accountability Office -- Congress' investigative arm. The two reports (first and second) released Tuesday highlight the way the division has failed to follow through on valid complaints, particularly for low-wage workers, leaving some cheated out of thousands of dollars in earned wages.

More than 130-million workers in America rely on the Wage and Hour Division to enforce laws that mandate overtime pay and minimum wages. But they shouldn't count on it.

Over the last 10 years, the number of enforcement actions has been reduced by more than a third, which GAO partly attributes to a declining number of investigators on the job.

Just to give you a sense of how uninterested government has become to the plight of underpaid workers, Kim Bobo, executive director of Interfaith Worker Justice, unearthed these statistics: In 1941 the division conducted 48,000 on-site investigations of businesses in industries known to slight worker pay. Fifteen hundred investigators visited one in every 10 businesses annually, helping to keep things honest. Today, the division has just 732 enforcement staffers who conduct fewer than 30,000 investigations per year. They are able to contact about one-third of 1 percent of businesses, mostly by phone.

"There is a crisis in the quantity of wages being stolen and an inability of the department to respond," Bobo says.

At her group's 19 worker centers around the country, 90 percent of the employees who come in seeking help have suffered wage theft. "They were either not paid for all their hours worked, not paid for valid overtime or, in the case of day laborers, not paid at all," Bobo says.

The GAO reports document some of these cases.

In one, rather than assist a homeless employee owed thousands of dollars in back wages for work at an assisted living facility, she was told to find a private attorney to file suit. The agency dropped the complaint because the employer said in August 2006 that it was unable to pay the wages owed. Yet the GAO found that the facility was still operating as of June 2008.

In another case, a delivery driver for an alcohol distributor with $25-million in annual net sales was not paid overtime. It took 17 months for the agency to assign an investigator to the complaint that was dropped six months later for possibly having passed the two-year statute of limitations.

When the division does follow through on complaints, Bobo says, it will often obtain only a portion of what's owed the employee as a "settlement." That means an employer who gets caught stealing wages suffers no downsides.

The low-wage folks who work in construction, home health care, hotels and restaurants, and such, can't feasibly hire a lawyer to get back the few hundred or thousand dollars owed them. The government has to do it.

And there's the glitch. There always seems to be plenty of money and will to rescue financial giants whose investments (gambles) turn sour, but when the working stiffs of America need help to get paid, our government doesn't have enough resources to help. Something's amiss here, deeply amiss.

• Undocumented workers from Guatemala and Mexico were paid as little as $5 per hour -- below minimum wage.

• A supervisor made a side business of selling the workers used vehicles, sometimes threatening them with loss of their job if they didn't purchase one.

• A supervisor duct-taped the eyes of an employee, who was then hit with a meat hook. The employee declined to report the incident for fear of being fired.

Then there are the safety issues that have dogged the operation. The Des Moines Register reviewed the latest available worker-injury reports. It found that in 2004 there were 120 injuries, such as workers suffering chemical burns and broken ribs. In 2005, there were 103 injuries that included hearing losses.

Also in 2005 there were three amputations by Agriprocessors machinery. The paper reported on Carlos Torrez, a father of four, who was working a 60-hour week when a mechanical saw used to cut up chicken parts took off a finger.

For these multiple amputations the company was fined $7,500 by state regulators.

Safety equipment was another way to extort money from workers. According to the Register, a memo from the company's vice president included an "equipment price list." Workers were charged $30 for pants and $30 for jackets if they wanted to protect themselves from the caustic chemicals they handled.

Women workers were particularly at risk. A Catholic nun reported that females were told that sexual favors were the barter for a promotion or shift change.

Company officials routinely refused to allow safety inspectors on the property without a court order.

Then, on May 12, an immigration raid occurred and more than a third of Agriprocessors' work force was detained as suspected illegal aliens. There are now some 270 workers, most from rural Guatemala, in federal prison on charges of using false identity documents.

Federal agents have also arrested two low-level supervisors, including one who is alleged to have charged workers $200 for new documents so they could continue working at the plant.

This is a start, but the arrests need to continue up the chain to the plant's top managers and owners. These overseers have been running a modern-day plantation or workhouse -- or whatever one might call today's hell-on-earth equivalent.

Their denials about knowing they were employing an illegal work force are implausible. For years Agriprocessors has been receiving letters from Social Security Administration telling the company of discrepancies between employee names and their stated Social Security numbers. In 2006 the plant was told that at least 500 workers had such discrepancies.

"Agriprocessors is a poster child for how to use a broken immigration system to exploit workers," notes Scott Frotman, a spokesman for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union.

Company officials were able to keep their work force helpless due to the undocumented status of so many. The result was inevitable: lousy pay, a disregard for safety, and workers cheated at every turn.

This is why I support the federal government's newfound vigor in investigating industries that rely on illegal alien labor. This is why we need to mandate that employers verify the legal status of their workers, with tough penalties attached for those found with undocumented employees.

Meatpacking at a unionized facility was at one time a ticket to a middle-class life. Today, thanks to absurdly lax enforcement of immigration laws, the same type of work buys a peasant's existence.

Illegal aliens are peasants-for-hire, and their exploitation is something too many companies relish when given the chance. We have to stop giving them that chance.

Originally published in the St. Petersburg Times]]>Scalia's 2nd Amendment Punttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2008:/theblog//3.1112302008-07-07T19:11:16-04:002011-05-25T12:35:19-04:00Robyn Blumnerhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/robyn-blumner/
Now we finally know what this Amendment means. The Supreme Court's five conservative justices have just ruled that we all have a constitutional right to own a gun.

So there it is, all of the NRA's dreams come true in one mighty legal swoop. I can just imagine Charlton Heston's cold, dead hands raised in elated celebration.

And to make it even sweeter, the majority opinion was written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the very justice who offers himself up as a strict constructionist. His ruling would undoubtedly be grounded in originalism and of such logical purity that no one could suggest that it had sprung from a personal ideological or political bent.

Funny, though, how the court's four liberal justices vigorously dissented, reading history and precedent quite differently and finding that the Second Amendment proclaimed a collective right protecting state militias.

Of course, they lost and Scalia's opinion is now law. So it's worth a walk through Scalia's logic constraining federal gun-control efforts, to see if it holds.

In District of Columbia vs. Heller, the court reviewed a district law barring the possession of handguns, even in one's home, and directing that rifles be dismantled or sport trigger locks. The court struck this down as unconstitutional.

In his analysis, Scalia spent a great deal of time laying out the historical underpinnings of the Second Amendment. Beyond the right of self-defense, Scalia declared that the framers viewed the right to bear arms as a check against an overbearing federal authority. Having just come through their own need to toss off the oppressive government of King George III, the framers thought it essential to empower a citizens' militia. "(W)hen the able-bodied men of a nation are trained in arms and organized, they are better able to resist tyranny," Scalia explained.

But if that's true, and the Second Amendment grants citizens the capacity to revolt against usurpations by government, then doesn't it follow that they have the right to the weapons needed to do so? Doesn't this logic lead us to an individual right to a nuclear device? How else to challenge an American government run amok? Or, if not so great a weapon of mass destruction then at least an assault rifle, the very basic outfit of any revolution.

No dice, Scalia says, in full punt mode. Scalia claims that the individual right to bear arms does not include "M-16 rifles and the like" because it covers only those weapons "in common use at the time" of the amendment's adoption in the 18th century and not "dangerous and unusual weapons."

First, all weapons are dangerous -- it's sort of the point. Second, if citizens in a militia -- or a person protecting his home from a robber -- is to have any chance today they must be armed with something better than a flintlock musket.

Not to worry, says Scalia, because the Second Amendment includes all modern advances of "bearable arms" even if they "were not in existence at the time of the founding." But not military-type arms.

There is no cohesive logic here. The Second Amendment's prefatory clause must mean something, at least granting individuals the right to weapons that a modern militia would carry. Scalia accepts an updating of the Constitution relative to weapons needed for defending oneself against a home invasion but not against government tyranny. That's pretty result-oriented judging and not terribly strict to any original construction.

The Second Amendment has always put me in a quandary since the framers' purposes for it inevitably leads to an open floodgate of weapons ownership. But Scalia's opinion was not an honest attempt at sorting this out. It was a sophistical, political decision of just the type that he rails against.

Now, back on Earth, let's look at how the rest of us are doing. Hmm. Not so well. Even for those in steady jobs, there is a creeping sense of instability, a generalized disquiet and unspoken worry that sits on one's shoulders adding drag to the day.

Packaged in this malaise is the spike in oil prices and what that will mean for gas prices and every other thing we buy, the bottoming out of the housing market, companies announcing huge layoffs, and rises in food and health insurance costs outpacing salaries and wages.

This volatility has led to a shift in how we see ourselves. "Vulnerable" is probably the best descriptor. Our thoughts turn to hunkering down rather than plans for the future.

But what makes this coming decline in economic security different from the one visited upon American families in the 1970s, for example, is that we are much less well-positioned to withstand the financial buffeting. The work of Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren indicates there is a coming collapse of the middle class and she can prove it with a raft of scary statistics and charts.

Warren says we are moving toward a two-class rather than a three-class society, where there is a somewhat larger upper class made up of the financially comfortable and then there is the rest of America, people who are "constantly living on the edge of a cliff." These are families who might appear to earn a decent income but they enjoy none of the financial security that we normally associate with middle-class status.

Warren compares the median American family of 1970 with that of 2003. She unpacks why our savings rate has dropped to zero from a rather healthy 11 percent of take-home pay in 1970, even as the family added Mom as a breadwinner.

Typically, blame for this lands on families themselves. They're spending themselves into penury by buying designer clothes for their kids and indulging in $4 lattes, say social commentators.

Not so, Warren counters. She says that Americans are actually spending far less in inflation-adjusted dollars for things like clothes and food, including eating out, than they did in 1970. What has substantially changed, Warren reports, is the cost of big-ticket, fixed expenses. So that even though the income of the median two-parent, two-child family is higher, because both parents are employed, the family has less income available to shore itself up against a rough patch.

Housing costs for a median-sized house (which has gotten modestly bigger since 1970 by adding either a second bathroom or a third bedroom but not both) have increased 76 percent. Health insurance costs are up 74 percent. Also up sharply are taxes (due to the second income), child care and car-related expenses. Americans keep a car more than two years longer than they did 30 years ago, but they now need two cars to get to two jobs.

These big, inflexible expenses cost the median family three-fourths of its two-earner income. In 1970 they cost half of the single breadwinner's.

We now live in a country where there is no financial margin for most families to fall back on in case someone gets sick or a job is lost. Life is far riskier.

Then add on an energy crisis and you can almost hear the foundation cracking.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, has received hundreds of e-mails from Americans who suddenly have found themselves in desperate financial straits. He's been reading their plaintive stories on the Senate floor. How they were middle class but are no longer.

But that hasn't stopped hysteria from gripping the ruling's opponents, starting with the unhinged and emotional dissent by Justice Antonin Scalia. He first lists the number of Americans killed by "radical Islamists" in various recent terror attacks. Then Scalia ominously predicts that the court's ruling "will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed."

Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker, followed on Face the Nationt by saying the court decision "is a disaster which could cost us a city."

Let's see, which is more likely to lead to increased attacks on Americans: (1) Being seen by the world as injecting a degree of fair process into the imprisonment of hundreds of Muslim men, so that only those who have truly threatened America's safety remain under lock? Or, (2) Being seen as disregarding and discounting the human rights of Muslims by holding them indefinitely without offering up any proof of wrongdoing?

The bloviaters on Fox News and their blinder-sporting audience may be the only ones left who don't know that hundreds of prisoners from Guantanamo who were dubbed "the worst of the worst" have now been freed. And while a relative handful of those have turned around to fight us, in large measure that has not happened. The Pentagon says that only 36 of the 420 prisoners released without charge are suspected to have or have returned to terrorism.

In other words, we simply got it wrong, time after time. Of the some 775 prisoners we sent to Guantanamo, the Pentagon only intends to put about 80 on trial. Many of those we picked up were not dangerous to the United States; according to published accounts, a number were sold to us by bounty hunters and warlords looking to make money or rid themselves of rivals.

Then we held them for years -- seriously mistreating some -- without giving them a chance to demonstrate their innocence.

How is getting rid of such travesties indifferent to American lives? I would call it a rescue. The Supreme Court has saved us from an administration that seems hell-bent on fostering Muslim resentment and incubating avenging jihad.

Upholding the Constitution doesn't make us less safe, only more careful with the lives of other people. Affording timely due process to those we suspect is an honorable endeavor engendering goodwill and worldwide respect, and serving, ultimately, as great a protective shield against attack.

Moreover, this is what America is about. This is what we do. This is who we are.

But, it was a very close call. Imagine if the court had gone the other way and determined that no court could review President Bush's designation of non-Americans for indefinite detention in an endless war on a limitless battlefield. And imagine if the court had said it was OK that hearings provided detainees are so stacked that the prisoner might not even get to see the "evidence" against him.

This is what tyrants tell a scared population: "To make you safe I need the power to dispense with fair process for some prisoners. Besides, they don't deserve it."

How many governments have made that very claim: Pinochet's Chile, Papa Doc's Haiti, Gadhafi's Libya, Mugabe's Zimbabwe? The list is endless and the company is distasteful.

It is positively mind-boggling that Sen. John McCain wants to add the United States to this pantheon. But his unreserved condemnation of the Boumediene ruling clarifies that beyond eliminating waterboarding, his policies toward detainees would look very much like the current court-repudiated ones.

From the perspective of protecting the environment, expanding access to health care, promoting a progressive energy policy and even fiscal responsibility, I agree with this statement. But it was interesting to read an analysis by Larry Bartels, a professor of politics at Princeton, bearing this out in hard numbers for the daily-grind worker.

Bartels found that the real incomes of middle-class families grew more than twice as fast when Democrats were in the White House than when a Republican was president. And for the working poor, their real incomes grew six times as fast under a Democratic president.

In his analysis of six decades of available economic data, Bartels allowed one year for the economic policies of each president to get in gear. He said that the only group for whom partisan politics had little impact was the affluent. Their fortunes grew healthily regardless of party in power.

Bartels, who wrote Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, found that income would be more equal today than in the 1950s had our national prosperity been shared under Republican presidents as it was under Democrats. Instead, our nation is increasingly one of haves and have-nots, mired in income inequality more severe than at any time since the days of robber barons.

This is no surprise in light of the parties' differing views of workers and their rights. One dependable way for employees at the lower end of the income scale to demand a piece of increased productivity and profits is through joining unions or threatening to do so. Democrats traditionally are supportive of this while Republicans are generally hostile.

While it is true that regardless of who has resided in the White House, rates of unionization have markedly declined over the last 40 years, it is also true that helping unions and workers succeed is a central tenet of the Democratic Party.

Contrast that with the administration of President Bush, who has unleashed government to hobble unions and their organizing efforts. In just one illuminating example, Bush's 2009 budget request seeks 100 times more money to regulate unions than to ensure that employers follow wage and hour laws and other labor protections. In dollars per regulated entity, Bush has budgeted $2,500 per union and union local and only $26 per employer, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Republican antipathy toward labor was also reflected in the lopsided vote on the Employee Free Choice Act, a measure that would help to neutralize the union-busting tactics of employers. In 2007, it passed the House with nearly every Democrat voting for it and 183 Republicans against, and died in the Senate due to Republican opposition.

Yet, a new report by John Schmitt, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, finds that unionization would bring a double-digit pay premium to at least 60 percent of America's workforce. Looking at national data for the years 2003 to 2007, the study concludes that unionization raises the income of the typical low-wage worker by 20.6 percent, and that of the median-wage worker by 13.7 percent.

The next election is momentous for the future of our nation in more ways than can be listed. But I believe it will seal the fate of the American worker. A Democrat in the White House is a vital step toward making us a fair country again, countering what we have become: a nation with a small cadre of investor-class winners and a vast population of struggling wage earners, with little ground left to lose.

Far from typical, far from "a nobody," O'Faolain became a bestselling writer through this book and the others that followed. In Are You Somebody?, the columnist for the Irish Times laid bare her bleak, neglected childhood and love-fraught womanhood in terms so hauntingly honest that it seemed truth would leach through the book's binding. I thought her writing was a revelation.

There are a number of modern authors whose facility with the written word and ability to plumb the human experience leave me in awe. These include Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Chabon, Mark Haddon, Mark Helprin and Jonathan Franzen. But if you asked me whose work touched me most, it would be O'Faolain's.

An unconventional, self-critical feminist, O'Faolain described the Ireland of her youth as a place where women had no opportunities beyond relentless motherhood. During the 1940s, the country was "a living tomb for women," she wrote.

Her alcoholic mother lived a miserable life with no independent means, shackled to her nine children whom she barely mothered, while O'Faolain's father, a society columnist, lived a full, adventurous and philandering life. This is the way it was. Men had vistas; women had babies.

O'Faolain never married or had children, but had serial relationships with partners, both male and female. Her reflections on her own choices and her angst at living, which is largely what she writes about, is like a ride on the therapy bus, bumpy and bruising at times, but also resplendently indulgent and starkly revealing.

O'Faolain died of cancer last month at 68, a terrible loss for fans like me. But weeks before she succumbed, O'Faolain gave a remarkable interview on RTE Radio One in Ireland. It was so raw and emotional that it was as if she was talking to her best friend, in confidence. Things one might only whisper, or only think to oneself and leave there, O'Faolain gave voice to.

"As soon as I knew I was going to die soon, the goodness went out of life," O'Faolain told interviewer Marian Finucane.

"I thought there would be me and the world, but the world turned its back on me, the world said to me, 'That's enough of you now and what's more we're not going to give you any little treats at the end.' "

When asked if she takes solace in an afterlife or in a god, O'Faolain called such ideas "meaningless."

"A song I heard a few years ago Thois i Lar an Ghleanna ... and the last two lines are two things, asking God up there in the heavens, even though you don't believe in him, to send you back, even though you know it can't happen. Those two things sum up where I am now," O'Faolain said, crying.

Even her anguished lament is offered up with a glint of Irish charm.

Of the things that O'Faolain will most miss, passion, which she described often in her writings as one of life's needful things, is not one. "Passion can go and take a running jump at itself," said the sandpaper-voiced O'Faolain. What she really wished is that she had been "a better thinker."

Even so, she made her readers think, about their own lives, about the lives of others, about the luck that comes our way and that which we make for ourselves.

O'Faolain was wrong about an afterlife. Her perspective on being an independent woman at this time in history will live on in many memories, mine especially.